The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) may reconsider its position of not supporting a third recall motion in the legislature against President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), a TSU legislative caucus whip said yesterday.
Mark Ho (何敏豪), director of the TSU's Policy Committee, said in an interview that the caucus would hold a meeting soon to discuss whether TSU legislators should support the third recall motion or abstain from voting as they did during the two previous recall motions.
The third recall motion, launched by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP), will be put to a vote on Nov. 24. The motion asks that a national referendum be held to determine whether the president should step down.
Ho explained that the TSU's position of opposing the third recall motion was a "temporary decision" that merited reconsideration after recent developments.
Only three days ago, the TSU expelled Taipei mayoral candidate Clara Chou (
On the same day, former Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲), a co-winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for chemistry, issued an open letter urging the president to step down after a public prosecutor indicted first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) on charges of corruption and forgery and named her and the president as "joint perpetrators" in an embezzlement case.
Lee is widely believed to have played a decisive role in helping Chen get elected as president in 2000 and win a second term in 2004.
At about the same time as Lee's open letter, an article in Taiwan News Weekly by former senior presidential adviser and I-Mei Food Co president Kao Chih-ming (高志明) -- a staunch pan-green supporter and major donor to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) -- also urged the president to step down to calm political turmoil.
Yesterday, Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟), who served as Presidential Office secretary-general between 2002 and 2003, also urged the president to resign in a letter to the editor carried by the Liberty Times, the Taipei Times sister newspaper.
Ho said TSU legislators planned to discuss the latest developments at a meeting and reach a decision on what policy to follow regarding the third recall motion. He stressed that nothing has been ruled out at present.
The TSU whip also said that Premier Su Tseng-chang (
The TSU holds only 12 seats in the 220-seat legislature. Even if all TSU legislators support the third recall motion, it is unlikely to pass because the KMT and the PFP would still need the support of some 20 DPP legislators to reach 147 votes and pass the two-thirds threshold.
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry